I’m beginning to feel excited about my life. I know this sounds strange because I have been traveling the World for the last 9 months. Your a probably like, “Oh boohoo Jamie, let me play my tiny violin for your pain”.
It might be you that this post is pointed at.
For the last 9 months I have let the question, “What’s next”, make me crazy. This need to know attitude has made me feel like I am constantly doing it wrong. When someone asks me what I did today and I’m like, “Uh, nothing really. I’m still in my pajamas but I did some yoga and studied Spanish and had a few skype video chats with people I love from around the world…. took a nap, made lunch, made dinner, stared out the window and contemplated life…” Somehow that feels like not enough or wrong. Like I SHOULD be out visiting museums and parks. I have this amazing opportunity and I’m just wasting it. This feeling is what has stopped me from writing for almost 5 months now. I felt like I was doing everything wrong and writing about it only made me feel like more of a loser and a failure.
There is this belief that staying inside and doing nothing means I am depressed or lazy. But in these quiet moments I have discovered so much. After months of my body getting the shit kicked out of it, is sitting quietly really a bad thing? If I spend 2 years traveling the world and never set foot in a museum and don’t see the “must see” tourist attractions, was it all a waste? What if all I do is stare out windows watching the people walk by, sit in parks and find pictures in clouds, learn the languages of the places I visit and feel the energy of the land there? Is that wrong? Is that bad? Have we confused depression with introspection? Just because I am not doing what most people are doing, does that mean that I have to be DOING something?
But this morning it shifted. I feel content and safe in doing whatever I am doing, even if what I am doing is nothing. I realized that I can stay here in Spain and learn the language with no strings. I can go to visit my family for the Holidays and then go to South America if I want and learn a new version of this language. Then I can pick a new country and learn the language there. Or I can hop from country to country. I can do whatever I want.
I AM FREE!
I am not sure if it is the constant, “What are you doing? Are you working? How do you live? Where are you going? Whats next? What did you do today? What are your plans for today? What are you doing tomorrow?”, that finally broke me, or the best one yet from guy I met last night, “So selling everything you own made you enough money to live the rest of your life?”, but I would like to thank all who have thrown those words my way because you have finally broken me open to the present moment.
The rest of my life? Babe, lets just get through today. Let me worry about the rest of my life when it gets here. If I can be here, now, then maybe the Universe truly will give me everything I need, in the moment I need it. Maybe this tension I have felt in my chest for the last 9 months, the worry about every penny spent, is the biggest lesson of them all.
13 years ago when I was 19 and just back from 9 months on tour, I moved to NYC. I had no worry of money. I lived day to day. I quit jobs that made me unhappy and new, more balanced, better paying jobs always appeared. As long as I stayed quiet in the face of chaos, the Universe ALWAYS whispered to me the answers. Always. Somewhere along the line I began to pick up others fears and carry them. “Oh, the way I am living scares you? Well, let me take that from you and hold it. There does that feel better? Man, I feel like shit.” All that chatter made it hard to hear the Universe, I thought that if I picked all those words up that maybe I would be able to hear better. But carrying those things didn’t make my life more quiet. All it did was make others beliefs and my beliefs scream at each other inside my head!
Months ago I started writing a blog along these same lines. It was based around the idea of if you want to carry someone else’s bags, don’t bitch when they are too heavy. I had an experience where a man picked up my carry on bag in an airplane to put it in the overhead. He underestimated my packing prowlness and the weight of said bag and he struggled to get it in the overhead bin. Maybe he felt insecure because of this, but he lashed out at me, scolding me about how there are weight limits on carry on bags because…. wait for it… Asians are small people and can’t lift that kind of weight over their heads.
:-0 I’ll give you a moment to take that one in.
Ummmm, yes I know there are weight limits for carry ons but I am going to go with it is so my 16kg bag doesn’t break the overhead bin, crashing down and killing the person seated in under it. But I am a risk taker and I’m not the one sitting under my bag. 😉
Oh, and I didn’t ask for your help, nor did you offer it. You simply took my baggage, made an ass of yourself and now your mad.
At me.
I have done this energetically for years now . We all do. Somewhere along the line we are programed to do it. I took everyone around me concerns, tied them to my body and then wondered why this once Free Bird couldn’t get off the ground.
And then I hated them for it.
This morning I realized I am still doing it as I travel. When you travel, you SHOULD do these things. Well folks, sorry, but Im not traveling. I’m living. I suggest you do the same and leave me the hell alone.
One Response
First, how inspiring that you wrote this on my birthday, and personally wrote me that “Life is good”? Love it!
Second, “What’s next?” That is the new mantra of my football team this year, the defending Superbowl Champions, Seattle Seahawks. For them, it is to repeat, to maintain the desire of doing it again, which is a very difficult thing to do. Hasn’t been done since the New England Patriots won it back to back in 2004 and 2005.
Finally, it looks like you have finally reached one of my hero’s famous quotes, “The stillness in stillness is not the real stillness; only when there is stillness in movement does the universal rhythm manifest.” ~ Bruce Lee
For me, I find this “quality of stillness” in tango…when I am fully relaxed and present in the embrace, and I can project this to my partner, a minute movement (soo subtle yet powerful enough) that it causes my follower to move with me as one together in harmony with the music…it is tango nirvana—and it can happen in both close or open embrace is what makes it so beautiful and magical. It is an art worth working on—stillness.
To me, you are certainly moving in the correct life path, my Dear, of true enlightenment and happiness. You are not being beaten down with a fixed 40-hour type workweek where making more money seems to shackle one of the most precious commodities of living—TIME. One has never enough time to do every you want to do because you have to work.
Because you have the courage to break free from chains of what the majority of people do, and to live in the moment, and finally listening to the Universe again that has guided you flawlessly in your earlier years, then strayed away from it, and now you have found it again. Follow it now to where it will…and again, I think you will be fine because you are following what you have always been striving for…and with a goal like that, who can be against?
Keep reaching for the Universe, Jamie.
Always, Sherman <3
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